Chosen for His Desert Throne

by Caitlin Crews

  But watching the doctor eat with abandon, as if every bite she put in her mouth was a new, sensual delight, was a revelation. She had him hard and ready. Intensely focused on her and the unbridled passion she displayed as if she was performing her joy for him alone.

  He could not recall ever experiencing anything quite like it.

  And certainly not because of a captive still in her prison attire.

  Still, Tarek smiled at her as if none of this was happening. He reminded himself—perhaps a bit sternly—that honey attracted more bees than vinegar. And that even a king could allow himself to act sweet if it suited him. It helped that his plan of how to handle the world’s reaction to her incarceration began to take form in his head.

  But she did not look particularly pleased to receive a smile from him. On the contrary, she looked... poleaxed.

  “Perhaps this is not the time to ask you these questions,” he said after a moment, when she only stared back at him. Her passionate eating on pause.

  Tarek tried to let consideration and concern shine forth from within him, and it wasn’t entirely an act for her benefit. He liked to think he was a compassionate man. Had he not proved it this dark year? He was certainly the most compassionate King the country had ever seen.

  Surely the life he’d led had given him ample opportunity to practice.

  Anya straightened her shoulders, a slight, deliberate jerk that he’d watched her do several times now. As if she was snapping herself to attention. And when she did, her brown eyes sharpened on him and he wondered, idly enough, if this was the doctor in her. That focus. That intensity.

  That, too, made his sex heavy.

  Later, Tarek promised himself, he would take a moment to ask himself why, exactly, he found himself attracted to a prisoner only recently released from his dungeon. Surely that spoke to issues within himself he ought to resolve. Especially if he truly thought himself compassionate in some way.

  “I’m happy to answer questions now,” she said, with a certain bluntness that made Tarek blink.

  He wondered if it was simply that she was a Western woman, doctor or no. They were different from the women of his kingdom; he knew that already. Anya Turner was forthright, even so recently liberated from her prison cell. She appeared to have no trouble whatever meeting his gaze and more, holding it. The women of his country played far different games. They were masters of the soft sigh, the submissively lowered eyes, all to hide their warrior hearts and ambitions—usually to become his Queen and rule the kingdom in their own ways.

  Not so this doctor, who had clearly never heard the word submissive in her life.

  It was an adjustment, certainly.

  “I had no idea you were being held here,” Tarek told her. He lifted his mobile as if she could read the documents Ahmed had sent him while she ate. “But I have read your file.”

  “Would anything have been different if you had known?” she asked, and it wasn’t precisely an interruption. He had paused.

  Still. That, too, was different.

  He reminded himself, with a touch of acid, that this was the woman who had cheerfully called him a pig while still behind bars. Unaware that he had come to liberate her, not punish her further.

  Perhaps blunt and forthright did not quite cover it.

  “I cannot alter the past, much as I would like to,” he said. He studied her, and the easy way she held his gaze. As if she was the one measuring him, instead of the other way round. “Do you know why you were imprisoned in the first place?”

  She let out a sharp little laugh of disbelief. Not a noise others generally made in his presence. “Do you?”

  Again, he indicated his mobile. He did not react to the disrespectful tone. Much. “I know what was written in your file when you were taken into custody.”

  Another deeply impolite sound, not quite a laugh, that he congratulated himself on ignoring. “I believe the pretext for our arrest was an illegal border crossing. The fact that we were administering humanitarian aid and were in no way dissidents fomenting rebellion or revolution did not impress your police force. Mostly there was a lot of shouting. And guns.”

  “That was an upsetting period here,” he agreed. “There was an attempt at a coup, as I mentioned. Dissidents tried to take the palace and there were a few, targeted uprisings around the country.”

  If he had only listened to his mother, he might have armored himself against the unforgivable affection that had allowed him to minimize his brother’s behavior over the years. He’d convinced himself Rafiq’s bad behavior was not a pattern. And even if it was, that it wasn’t serious.

  “A man who will be King cannot allow love to make him a danger to his country,” his mother had warned him. “What a man loves is his business. What a king loves can never be anything but a weapon used against him.”

  Tarek had never imagined that weapon would be a literal one. Or that he would wish, deeply and surpassingly, that he had listened more closely to his mother when he’d had the chance.

  There was something about the sharp focus Anya trained on him, complete with a faint frown between her brows, that he liked a lot more than he should. When he knew he would consider it nothing short of an impertinence in anyone else. And would likely react badly.

  But even this doctor’s focus felt like passion to him.

  “A coup? In the palace?” She waited for his nod. “You mean they came for you. Here.”

  “They did.” He did not precisely smile. “More accurately, they tried.”

  Rafiq had tried. Personally. A bitter wound that Tarek doubted would ever truly heal.

  Still, he had the strangest urge to show her his scars. An urge he repressed. But he found himself watching the way her expression changed, and telling himself there was a kind of respect there.

  “You’re lucky you have so many guards to protect you, then.”

  He opted not to analyze why that statement bothered him so much.

  “I am,” Tarek agreed, his voice cooler than it should have been, because it shouldn’t have mattered to him what this woman thought—of him or the kingdom or anything else. “Though they were little help when my brother and his men tried to take me after what was meant to be a quiet family meal commemorating the two-month anniversary of our father’s death.”

  He did not like the memory. He resented that he was forced to revisit it.

  Yet Anya’s expression didn’t change and Tarek could feel her...paying closer attention, somehow. With the same ferocity she’d used while demolishing a plate of pastries earlier.

  Why did that make him want her so desperately?

  But even as he asked himself the question, he knew the answer. He could imagine, all too well, that fierce, intent focus of hers on his body. On what they could do together.

  He wrestled himself under control and wasn’t happy at how difficult it proved. “It was a confusing time. I regret that there were far more imprisonments than there should have been, and, indeed, your colleagues were released as soon as order was restored. But due to the vagaries of several archaic customs, you were not. I could explain why, but what matters is that the responsibility is mine.”

  She broke her intense scrutiny of him then, glancing away while her throat moved. “They were released? How long ago?”

  “As I said, when order was restored to the kingdom.”

  She looked back at him, her eyes narrow. “Thank you. But is that a week ago? Seven months ago? Twenty-four hours after they were taken in?”

  “I do not think they were incarcerated for very long.” That was no more and no less than the truth, as far as he knew it. He should not have felt that strange sense that he’d betrayed her, somehow. By telling her? Or by allowing it to happen in the first place—not that he’d known? Tarek felt the uncharacteristic shift about in his seat like a recalcitrant child. He restrained it. “No more
than two months, I am given to understand.”

  Across from him, Anya sat very still in her gray, faded tunic, that hair of hers tumbling all around her. She shook her head, faintly, as if she was trying to shake off a cloud. Or perhaps confusion. “I was forgotten about?”

  Tarek held her gaze, surprised to discover he did not want to. He reminded himself that this was the foremost duty of any king, like it or not. Accountability.

  It didn’t matter that he hadn’t known she existed, much less that she and her colleagues had been caught up in the troubles here. Just as it didn’t matter that he hadn’t known until this very afternoon that she had been languishing in his very own dungeon. He was responsible all the same.

  He might as well have slammed shut the iron door and turned the key himself.

  Tarek inclined his head. “I’m afraid so.”

  She nodded, blinking a bit. Then she cleared her throat. “Thank you for your honesty.”

  And for a moment, there was quiet. She did not reach for more food from the platters before her. She did not hold him in the intensity of her brown gaze, shot through with gold in the hectic light that filled this salon.

  For a moment there was only the faint catch of her breath, hardly a sound at all. The sound of birds calling to each other outside. The lap of the fountain out on her terrace.

  And the improbable beat of his own pulse, hard and heavy in his temples. His chest. His sex.

  Tarek could not have said if it was longing...or shame.

  He had so little experience with either.

  “You should know that your presence here has created something of an international crisis,” he said when he could take the pressing noise of the silence between them no longer. “Something else I’m embarrassed to say I was unaware of until today.”

  She smirked. “It’s created a crisis for me, certainly. An unwanted and forced eight-month vacation from my life.”

  “I want to be clear about this,” Tarek said. “Were you harmed in any way?”

  “Define harm,” she shot back. “I expected to be beaten. Abused.”

  “If this happened, you need only tell me and the perpetrators will be brought to justice. Harsh justice to suit their crimes. I swear this to you, here and now.”

  “None of those things happened,” Anya said, but her voice was thicker than it had been before. “And maybe your plan is to throw me right back into that cell today, so let me assure you that it’s an effective punishment. That cell is deceptively roomy, isn’t it? It’s still a cell, cut off from the world.”

  He leaned forward, searching her face. “But you were not harmed?”

  Her lips pressed into a line. “How do you measure the harm of being captured, shouted at in a language you don’t speak, separated from the rest of your colleagues, and then thrown into a cold stone cell? Then kept there for months, never knowing if today might be the day the real terror might begin? Or you might be trotted out for an execution? I don’t know how to measure that. Do you?”

  Tarek studied her closely. Looking for scars, perhaps. Or some hint of emotional fragility or tears, because that, he would understand. But instead, this woman looked at him as if she was also a warrior. As if she too had fought, in her own way.

  He felt his own scars, hacked into his flesh in this very same palace, throbbing as if they were new.

  “It is all unfortunate,” he said quietly. “There are many ways to fight in a war, are there not? And so many of them are not what we would have chosen, had we been offered a choice.”

  “I’m a doctor,” she replied, matching his tone. Her dark eyes tight on his. “When I go to war, it’s to heal. Never to fight.”

  “We all fight, Doctor. With whatever tools we are given. Whether you choose to admit that or do not is between you and whatever it is you pray to.”

  And for another long, impossibly fraught moment, they only stared at each other. Here where the desert sun made the walls shimmer and dance. A fitting antidote to the dungeon, he thought. Abundant, unavoidable sunshine made into a thousand different colors, until the sheer volume of it all made breath itself feel new.

  But as the silence wore on, he found the glare she leveled on him with those sharp, clever eyes of hers far more intriguing.

  Another thing he did not plan to look at too closely.

  “Do you have more questions?” she asked. Eventually. “I find the longer I’m out of that cell, the harder it is not to want to scrub myself clean of the experience. Assuming, that is, that this isn’t all a great ruse.”

  Tarek understood, then, how easy it would be if this was the trick she thought it was. His brother, for example, would have thought nothing of fabricating some explanation for keeping this woman locked up—a law she’d broken that no one could prove she hadn’t—and then tossing her back down in the dungeon to rot. His treatment of his own staff had been the despair of the palace. Rafiq would not have cared about international opinion. If things grew tense, he would have closed the American embassy, shut the Alzalam borders, and continued to do as he pleased.

  But Tarek was not his grasping, morally vacant younger brother. His vision of the kingdom did not involve petty tyrannies, no matter the inconvenience to him, personally.

  “I am not the kind of man who plays games,” he told her, which should have gone without saying. He accepted that she was unlikely to know this about him. “Ruses of any kind do not impress me nor appeal to me. You will not be returning to that cell, or any other cell in my kingdom.”

  “Because you say so?”

  “Because I am the King and so decree it.”

  “That sounds impressive.” She did not sound impressed.

  He shoved that aside. “But should you choose to reach out to the outside world, I would have you recognize that the moment I knew of your imprisonment, you were released.”

  She blinked again. Tarek wondered if he was watching her think. And sure enough, her gaze sharpened even further in the next moment. “Wait. My imprisonment is your crisis? Not my presence. But the actual fact that I’ve been locked away for eight months.”

  There were so many things he could have said to that. He entertained them all, then dismissed them, one by one.

  “Yes.”

  Anya’s lips quirked. “What level of crisis are we talking about here?”

  “I have not had time to study it in any detail, I am afraid. As I was more focused on removing you from the dungeon as quickly as possible.”

  “Your mercy knows no bounds, I’m sure.”

  These were extraordinary circumstances and she was the victim in this, so Tarek ignored the insolent tone. Though it caused him physical pain to do so.

  Or perhaps you only wish for an excuse to touch her, something insidious and too warm within him whispered.

  “My understanding is that your imprisonment is considered a humanitarian crisis in many Western countries. And as our papers have only recently begun discussing the outside world again, after this long year of unrest, it has gone on far longer than it should have.”

  Anya nodded. “And I’m not a thoughtless tourist smuggling in drugs in a stranger’s teddy bear, am I? That can’t look good for you.”

  Tarek unclenched his jaw. “As a token of my embarrassment and a gesture of goodwill, I will throw a dinner this very night. We will invite your ambassador. You can assure him, in your own words, that you are safe and well.”

  That little smirk of hers deepened. “And what if I’m neither safe nor well?”

  Tarek wanted to argue. She had eaten, she was sparring with him—him—and a glance at her cell had told him that she had not been suffering unduly while in custody. There were far greater ills. As a doctor, she should know that.

  But he thought better of saying such things. What did he know about Americans? Perhaps the harm she’d spoken of was real enough. She c
ould not possibly have been raised as hardy as the local women. Equal to sandstorms and blazing heat alike, all while keeping themselves looking soft and yielding.

  It was only kind to make allowances for her upbringing.

  “Then you may tell the ambassador of your suffering,” he said instead of what he wanted to say. Magnanimously, he thought. “You may tell him whatever you wish.”

  “You will have to forgive me,” Anya said, sounding almost careful. It was a marked contrast to how she’d spoken to him before, with such familiarity. “But I can’t quite wrap my head around this. I expect to be seized again at any moment and dragged back to the dungeon. I certainly can’t quite believe that the King of Alzalam is perfectly happy to give me carte blanche to tell any story I like to an ambassador. Or to anyone else.”

  Tarek made his decision then and there. The plan that was forming in his head was outrageous. Absurd on too many levels to count. But the more it settled in him, the more he liked it.

  It was simple, really. Elegant.

  And while bracing honesty was not something he had ever imagined would factor into his usual relationships with women, such as his betrothal, this woman was different. If she wasn’t, she would not have ended up in his dungeon. She would certainly not have been here, telling him to his face that she doubted what he said to her. His word, which was law.

  He ought to have been outraged. Instead, he accepted that he had to treat his doctor...differently.

  It wouldn’t be the first time in this long and difficult year that he’d had to change strategy on the fly. To set aside old plans and come up with new ones, then implement them immediately. Tarek liked to think he’d developed a talent for it.

  The kingdom was ancient. Yet the King could not be similarly made of stone, or he would be the first to crumble. His father had taught him that, his mother had tried to warn him, but Tarek had lived it.

  “Of course I wish that I could control what it is you might say about your time here,” he told her, and watched the shock of that hit her, making her fall back in her seat. “I have no wish to be thought a monster, and I would love nothing more than to present your emancipation...carefully and in a way that brings, if not honor to the kingdom, no greater shame. But that is not up to me.”